Joan Chase's two novels, During the Reign of the Queen of Persiaand The Evening Wolves, won excellent reviews and wide admiration.Now Chase has published her first collection of short stories,Bonneville Blue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.95), a series of unevenbut haunting portraits of invisible people living ordinary lives.
The stories, variously set in a period extending from the 1950sto the present, seem rooted early in the period. Perhaps that'sbecause Chase's characters feel like products of simpler, moretraditional truths, even when they are dealing with contemporaryissues. They are congruent with a rural landscape - most of thestories take place in some non-specific rural locale - and withearthier values.
The title story focuses on Irene Lee, a middle-aged woman whospends her routine days taking care of other people's children andlives in a scabby housing development. "The houses were lined uplike a row of family headstones, before rectangular plots ofcrabgrass, as if all of them had kicked the bucket from heart diseaseand didn't know it." With sentences such as these Chase sketches apicture of a suffocating existence in which the shiny blue car overwhich her husband lovingly labors is "the best sight we've got in acountry mile."
In "Black Ice," a couple's disintegrating marriage is measuredby a phone call that recalls a steady litany of automobiles and theirrespective accidents. The cliff-flying Oldsmobiles, hill-slidingBuicks, and various curve-crashes symbolize a life gone out ofcontrol.
The narrator in "The Marrier," frustrated in her marriage,recalls (or maybe imagines) her love for a strange, bedraggled youngman who first came to the edge of her town as part of a commune. "Hemade me feel that going into his bed, although it was a place undersiege, would have been worth that last part of myself." This storyfeels artificial and stumbles under too many layers of imagery.
The three best stories in the collection all concern adolescentgirls. The teenage voice, with its wildy unpredictable mood swings,introspective, nearly narcissistic focus, and growing sexualawareness is well-suited to Chase's extravagant style.
The narrator of "Elderberries and Souls" gradually replaces achildish crush on a glamorous uncle with a more womanly desire for aboy her own age. In "Aunt Josie," the narrator recalls the summerthat her aunt, in word and deed, demonstrated the way in which it wasimportant to make a man feel special. And in "Peach," the best ofthe three, a new girl in town becomes, along with others in herclass, a devoted follower of the headstrong, charismatic Peachbecause "everything was being transformed and we needed someone toshow us the way." This story is particularly moving and effective inshowing how the onset of menstruation sets girls apart from oneanother, as it also marks a shift in their relationships with malecontemporaries.
Chase is a risk-taker. She dives into her stories and barelycomes up for air. She shows scant inclination to provide readerswith a straightforward narrative; when she does, it's so denselypacked with emotional intensity that it's secondary to the study ofher characters' emotions. She focuses her attention on intimatedetails. She blurs the boundary between observer and observed, oftenremoving her own narrative presence. She asks readers to dive inwith her until we feel, at a gut level, the sensations her charactersexperience.
This technique doesn't always work. In some of the lesssuccessful stories it results in a rambling, unfocused effect, wherethe lack of attention to structure detracts from the overallemotional impact, and Chase's skills are more apparent than the storyitself. But when it does work, the densely layered intensity ofChase's style packs a wallop and produces stories whose image istheir impact.
